Forum:When is digging for victory a good idea?

I am currently playing a lawful priestess, and after clearing Sokoban and the Gnome King's cellar, I was faced with a conundrum. While I had relatively good armor (AC -3), I had no reflection, a blessed corroded +1 mace, and my spells are identify, detect food, and force bolt. My intrinsics are telepathy, see invis, and resist poison.

On the other hand, I had rings of teleport control, polymorph control, and regeneration (and some other nice ones). My scrolls included taming and teleport. I had some booze. I had a number of 175 wands, two wands of digging, and had identified wands of polymorph and cancellation in a shop. And I have boots of jumping.

As much as I had avoided even thinking of digging for victory in the past, it seemed like it was almost the obvious play. My quest artifact is worse than useless given my spell selection (I have a +2 orcish helm), and none of my three main problems (MR, reflection, weapon) have any obvious solutions, although polymorph control mitigates the MR problem and I could try and convert the minetown altar and hope I get a good artifact longsword from sacrifice. (which would cause problems getting the sceptre of might later)

While the run did work (even though I was a bit sloppy), was I being too risky? Would I have been better off getting a longsword and cautiously pushing forward? Or is my judgment correct that I had a near-perfect kit for snagging the /owishing early?--Preceding unsigned comment added by Hurkyl (talk • contribs) 09:22, 27 April 2013‎

Maud pulls off speed runs with ridiculously little resources. If you want so see a master dig for victory, watch his ttyrecs.

That said, I feel dig for victory is a viable strategy once you know what you're doing, and have the resources to counter the titan, the minotaurs, teleporting liches, a way to operate the drawbridge (or phase there directly), a way to detect the chest of wishing, and a plan how to get past the throne room monsters.

In your case, I'd have killed some nymphs and dug for victory, too. --Tjr (talk) 13:06, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Success; got my first priest ascension (to go with my one valkyrie and one barbarian). The scroll of taming was my main plan for minotaurs, and there was one near where I landed on the castle level so it's a good thing I was prepared! My plan for getting the wand was to polymorph into a Xorn, snagging the wand then phasing back out. My Xorn form died, so I wound up going with the second of my plans: levelporting back to the top of the dungeon rather than using up another polymorph charge. In hindsight, that should have been my main plan anyways. Hurkyl (talk) 03:58, 28 April 2013 (UTC)